plainpainter

Actually the more I think about it - I have a really hot hot deck - that constantly is barfing up sap through the stain because it gets so hot. I would drench that deck with Cretowood - to totally petrify it on the inside - so no chance of sap oozing out like little volcanic activity - and then topcoat it with woodtux.

I'd almost skip the woodtux step and just drench that thing twice a year with timberoil - until your satisfied that wood is totally filled with oils - then like 2-3 years down the road do a woodtux treatment.

Lot of people giving their expert opinion on this site, but Jim - you really back up your opinion with some good logic. I never thought about that.

I kind of disagree with the softwoods with Beth and Rod. I did two seperate ptp jobs - one where the deck aged 8-10 months - another where the wood had been installed 4-5 years ago. They both got the same prep - both stained with woodtux out of the same pail - the deck that was only 8 months old looks like crap - the step I stained that was 4-5 years old - looks brand new, same stain, out of the same pail, same wood, difference in age.

I find the nuances between the stains to be cutting 'fine' hairs. The only reason to use woodrich, is because you have a crew or guys that can't deal with woodtux. I used woodtux on a mahogany deck - pics I posted here a couple of weeks ago - and this so called hard to penetrate wood - drank the woodtux like it was nobody's business. I passed a lambswool applicator with spirits over the top to make sure no excess was left over.

Bleach is my favorite guilty pleasure. I use sodium bisulfite to neutralize it now - the aftereffect is muriatic acid which gives the 'brightening' effect.

Ken I could have given you a recipe for the sodium hydroxide that would have performed miracles without furring.

Rick - that deck sanded out real nice! What sanders are you using?

Have any of you gone to an appointment for an estimate - show up on time, and knock on the door and ring the bell, call their # from the cell - and they never answer the door? And to boot - you see figures of people walking around inside. Has this ever happened to you? It just happened to me - do I just dismiss as F'd up wackos?

Kevin - I tried dissolving HD-80 into water, and unless the planets were in a very strange alignment that day - I think HD-80 has extremely poor disolving rates. That's not to say you can't get it to dissolve as spec'd by the manufacturer - Russell has never sold HD-80 as a downstreamable product. But having tried to make it 'downstreamable' my first attempt failed.

This is exactly what I said in another post - what do you gain by using a low VOC product if you use it twice or three times as often? I think Beth said something to the effect we use them because it's healthier for the environment. But that is ignoring the fact that 3 sequential applications of a 'healthier' product is in fact when you add up all the VOC's for all three applications is in fact much higher than a supposed 'polluter'. This is the EPA being penny wise and pound foolish in my opinion. There should be a 'quality' matrix involved - and two things should be analyzed like 'endurance' and VOC's. This is almost like baseball where they used batting averages to determine how good a player was. Now they use 'on-base-percentage' along with their hitting average to form a more complete picture of a player.

Ok - I got lots of opinions. And this is mine. I think anyone that thinks higher gas pricing has any effect on whether or not clients elect to have services done - is absolutely looney. If you travel 20,000 miles a year - a high number - and get on average 27mpg with gas at $4/gallon. That totals close to 3 grand. What I am trying to get across - is that our customers have other expenses that make gas pricing seem like mole hills in comparison. During the past 20 years has anyone watched the 'inflationary' rate of college tuition? The very best colleges out there increasing their tuition several grand a year. Parents with several children faced with 35k yearly bills per child. Yet nobody ever balked at our pricing while this was going on. Now gas and milk go up a lousy couple of bucks a gallon - and the whole world is going to hell? I have a sister that works in the milk industry - and she can tell you, milk has been priced below cost for years - it's a fixed industry from the Feds. And now they're finally playing catch up time. Experts saying that we've been paying real cheap for gas - it's just reality folks. If you are use to buying butter for $1/lb. And buy at most $50 a year - now butter goes up to $3/lb - you're only still paying $150. And you're gonna cry? Please - lose the $800 BMW monthly bill before crying about the little things. My clients have loads of money - and higher gas pricing is just affording them a 'psychology' to chisel me down - and I see lots of contractors buying into it.

James - I don't do resto without it either, but I just haven't figured a way to charge for it. The idea sounds so alien to most consumers - they don't understand me half the time when I explain it to them.

Beth - as a painter, I have seen the 'tax rebate' effect for over ten years - it's nothing new, and does't seem to have anything to do with economic cycles. I do agree alot with you on economic forecasts - we're not immune as a buisness. But then again - the more higher end homes we target, the less we will be affected. I live in neighborhoods with no evidence of foreclosures. I just don't know if $4/gallon gas is really an indicator of a recession. I think as Americans we have taken for granted cheap gas for far too long - the price we pay, is still nowhere compared to the average european payed 20 years ago. And their economies have had their ups and downs during that time, with no real correlation to the price of gas. If gas was more like $10/gallon - then that would be a problem. But your gallon of milk - over the course of a year, how much does that really add up to? You only need a core salary of 50-60 grand to pay for all the 'core' essentials in life, and everything you make over that is just gravy imo - that allows you to buy unnecessary itmes such as luxury cars, homes exceeding 3,000 sq.ft., swimming pools, vacations to the caribbean - all nice things, but not necessary for living.

I did some interior painting last December for a woman, and she had this rug on her floor that she spent 800k for - I don't think she cares about gas.

Jon brings up a good point, how about the 'silver' lining with the cost of gas. If these lowballers are already working with razor thin margins - couldn't the cost of gas be the one thing that stops them in their tracks? Or lets look at it another way - we ain't burning fuel like an airline company - fuel just isn't such a core thing like for a jet which needs millions of gallons for thrust.

Like I said - we're all in the same boat - business is business, and passing on those costs is exactly what we are suppose to do as businessmen. Here is another question that may make more sense - has anyone computed the costs to doing a housewash compared to this time last year and the year before? How much are we really talking?

Ok - put into perspective. My astrovan can go 750 miles or 2 fillups a week - and spending about $150/week on gas. Say gas was half the price - I'd be spending $75/week. Is that extra $75 really hard to pass onto the customer? An extra $25 on a last years $350 housewash - and you paid the difference in 3 housewashes - and probably nobody will have balked at your pricing - am I really off on this? It just seems to me so many people balking at price increases like the cost of milk - at the same time have an $800 per month loan on their lexus.

My point is - if we are professionals, can't we just pass on the cost to the customer? I know in the painting trades. Painters use to be really sensitive to price increases. Now if you talk to my independent paint dealer - he'll tell you that if 2 guys in a hundred squawks about price increases - he would be surprised, everyone is just passing on the cost to the customer. We're all in the same boat - it's not like I am paying only a $1.20 a gallon, and undercut everyone else.

Just a remark - but just perusing the msds sheets for HD-80 - I think there is a chemistry problem when you have Sodium hydroxide and sodium metasilicate at 1:1 ratios. They should be offset.

I agree with Rick - I cleaned my friends mothers little pressure-treated step, with a very simple bleach cleaning and wtw staing. It was like 4 years old and 'seasoned'. With the same batch of stain and only done 4 weeks apart was brand new Fir stair treads. A year later the Fir looks absolutely horrible - yet the 'junky' little pressure treated step looks like I did it yesterday.

Thanks Rick, for the update - this is alot of great information. So are you happy with your present system after this test? Or are you looking for alternatives?

Here are some pics of a mahogany deck restoration job that I got - I was a fish out of water doing this work. Ended up using wtw brown sugar. These are the before photos. Deck I believe was about 4 years old - house was built and deck stained for new homeowners.

Rick - I downstreamed that deck - and it had a really nasty thick film forming arylic based stain on it. The stripper as applied was only like 1oz. of HD-80 per gallon. Totally stripped the deck clean - it was the addition of glycol and nonylphenol surfactant that really saved the day. The technique is different. You flood a deck as long as you can possibly stand it with water - and then downstream your stripper everywhere - and let it dry - reapply, and check for when finish is emulsified - then you can begin a an easy strip. Downstreaming floods wood so much you don't need as a high a concentration. And the method of letting stripper dry as talked about by Rod - really works wonders.

It was totally stripped. I had a worker go over the floorboards with a portercable heavy duty orbital sander with 60 grit. If anything - some spots may have got missed - all the boards were cupped and really hard to sand evenly. I didn't even have to sand the boards really - just did it as an extra. But there was nothing left.